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Host & Producer Kathryn Mishell

Kathryn Mishell, Host of Into the Light Radio

Photo © 1999 by Brenda Ladd Photography

Kathryn Mishell was born in Los Angeles, where she received her early musical training. Her college and graduate work were done at Pomona College, The University of Kansas, and the University of Southern California. During these years she was a piano student of John Perry and a composition student of John Pozdro and then Ingolf Dahl.

Ms. Mishell's works include over a hundred piano pieces, ensemble and orchestral works, and music for chorus, dance and theatre. Her published collections of pieces for piano students have sold thousands of copies nationwide. She is one of two women composers honored by the National League of American Pen Women in 1996. She was the 1997 commissioned composer of the Texas Music Teachers Association, and has received ASCAP awards for the past several years. Her commissions include chamber works for Trio Contraste, Chamber Soloists of Austin, the Arundel Trio, Pacific Serenades of Los Angeles, Musiques en Euroreígion, and Austin Lyric Opera's Armstrong Community Music School, for which she is composer-in-residence. Mishell has participated in the Women's Philharmonic New Music Reading Sessions, the Society of Composers National Conference, and has been guest composer at the UT at Austin.

Ms. Mishell is producer and host of Into the Light, a weekly radio program devoted to the music of women composers, now in its eighth year. Produced at KMFA, the fine arts station in Austin, it has twice won an international Communicator Award of Distinction for excellence in broadcasting. This project extends into the concert world as Ms. Mishell produces, lectures, and performs Into the Light, Live for audiences.

Kathryn Mishell, Host of Into the Light Radio

Photo © 1999 by
Brenda Ladd Photography

As pianist, Ms. Mishell has performed extensively in the U.S. and Mexico as a soloist and in chamber music. She has been touring pianist for the Sharir Dance Company, and for the music dramas Paganini! and Heroes and Lovers, for which she wrote the incidental music. She is a regular performer on Salon Concerts in Austin.

A teacher of many award-winning young pianists, Ms. Mishell has taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and has acted as clinician, adjudicator, and as consultant in the use of computers in music instruction. She maintains a large class of private piano students in Austin, where she has twice been awarded the Outstanding Pre-collegiate Teaching Award.

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